W h y s o m e c o m p a n I e s m a k e t h e
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| PITNEY B O WE S VERSUS A D DR E SSO GRAP H Annual Revenues, 1963-1 998 Constant 1998 Dollars, in Millions Pitney Bowes Addressograph was not even close to winning the war, and people throughout the company knew it at the time. Yet the truth went unheard until it was too In fact, many of Addressograph's key people bailed out of the company, dispirited by their inability to get top management to deal with the Perhaps we should give Mr. Ash some credit for being a visionary who tried to push his company to greater heights. (And, to be fair, the Address- ograph board fired Ash before he had a chance to fully carryout his But the evidence from a slew of respectable articles written at the time suggests that Ash turned a blind eye to any reality inconsistent with his own vision of the world. 72 Jim Collins "When you turnover rocks and look at all the squiggly things underneath, you can either put the rock down, or you can say, 'My job is to turnover rocks and look at the squiggly things' even if what you see can scare the hell out of That quote, from Pitney Bowes executive Fred Purdue, could have come from any of the Pitney Bowes executives we interviewed. They all seemed a bit, well, to be blunt, neurotic and compulsive about Pitney's position in the world. "This is a culture that is very hostile to complacency" said one "We have an itch that what we just accomplished, no matter how great, is never going to be good enough to sustain us" said Pitney's first management meeting of the new year typically consisted of about fifteen minutes discussing the previous year (almost always superb results) and two hours talking about the "scary squiggly things" that might impede future Pitney Bowes sales meetings were quite different from the "aren't we great" rah-rah sales conferences typical at most companies The entire management team would lay itself open to searing questions and challenges from salespeople who dealt directly with customer The company created a longstanding tradition of forums where people could stand up and tell senior executives what the company was doing wrong, shoving rocks with squiggly things in their faces, and saying, Look You'd better pay attention to The Addressograph case, especially in contrast to Pitney Bowes, illustrates a vital point. Strong, charismatic leaders like Roy Ashcan all too easily become the de facto reality driving a company. Throughout the study, we found comparison companies where the top leader led with such force or instilled such fear that people worried more about the leader-what he would say, what he would think, what he would do- than they worried about external reality and what it could do to the company. Recall the climate at Bank of America, described in the previous chapter, wherein managers would not even make a comment until they knew how the CEO felt. We did not find this pattern at companies like Wells Fargo and Pitney Bowes, where people were much more worried about the scary squiggly things than about the feelings of top management. The momenta leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more charismatic counterparts. Good to Great 73 Winston Churchill understood the liabilities of his strong personality, and he compensated for them beautifully during the Second World War. Churchill, as you know, maintained a bold and unwavering vision that Britain would not just survive, but prevail as a great nation-despite the whole world wondering not if but when Britain would sue for peace. During the darkest days, with nearly all of Europe and North Africa under Nazi control, the United States hoping to stay out of the conflict, and Hitler fighting a one-front war (he had not yet turned on Russia, Churchill said "We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this, nothing will turn us. Nothing We will never parley. We will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land. We shall fight him by sea. We shall fight him in the air. Until, with God's help, we have rid the earth of his Armed with this bold vision, Churchill never failed, however, to confront the most brutal facts. He feared that his towering, charismatic personality might deter bad news from reaching him in its starkest form. So, early in the war, he created an entirely separate department outside the normal chain of command, called the Statistical Office, with the principal function of feeding him-continuously updated and completely unfiltered-the most brutal facts of He relied heavily on this special unit throughout the war, repeatedly asking for facts, just the facts. As the Nazi panzers swept across Europe, Churchill went to bed and slept soundly I had no need for cheering dreams" he wrote. "Facts are better than Download 3.69 Mb. Share with your friends:
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